Book review: ‘Tenth of December,’ by George Saunders

I once saw the undisputed king of Valley Girl dialogue suck the air out of an auditorium in seven clean syllables. It was an April 2011 reading in San Marcos, and one of the dozens of reverential aspiring writers in attendance timidly asked George Saunders why so many of his characters suffer from mental or physical handicaps.

Saunders promptly broke our hearts: “I’m a writer of few tools,” he said.

They’re tools that appear so easy to mimic: Drop a “wow” here, a “like” there, add a generous helping of corporate adspeak, and either (in Saunders’ words) “lop off a limb” or dump your character into a quasifuturistic amusement park, and wow, you’ve got an acclaimed story collection. This is why Saunders has spawned so many imitators.

The difference between Saunders and a Saunders imitator? While the latter can mimic his style, he or she can never hope to replicate the steaming gobs of pathos that style expresses. The truth is, George Saunders is a writer of staggering tools.

It’s that pathos that dominates Tenth of December, Saunders’ fourth story collection. In “Home,” a returning PTSD-ridden vet finds his ill mother evicted and his girlfriend and two kids living with another man; although he’s thanked repeatedly and robotically for his service, nobody will bother to help him reconnect with society.

The eponymous protagonist in “Al Roosten” makes a fool of himself at a bachelor auction. “Give it a week,” his (unwitting) rival says, “nobody will even remember it.” What Al’s really being told is that nobody will remember him after he dies.

In the title story, a fat kid falls through a frozen pond trying to save a suicidal cancer patient, the cancer patient in turn saves the fat kid, and “everything was good now” until the cancer patient realizes he’ll go right back to his deathbed and the fat kid will return to being tortured at school, possibly legless now due to frostbite. (Here, Saunders lops off the ending before lopping off the limbs.)

Amusement parks, ghosts, inanimate objects brought to life and speech: Saunders has cut his old gimmicks and taken a more realist tack.

Witness the two mothers in “Puppy.” Well-to-do Marie views her maternal role as “just a caretaker.” At Callie’s white-trashy house, Marie, there to buy a puppy, and hence the love of her children, discovers a boy tethered to a tree. While chastising the oblivious Callie, Marie says, “One really shouldn’t possess something if one [isn’t] up to properly caring for it.”

Right? Don’t tie your child to a tree. But Callie is raising three learning-disabled children while hovering around the poverty line. And Bo is tethered only because he’s inclined to wander, and the doctor has said, “This boy is going to end up dead if you don’t get this under control.” So tying Bo up is an act of love and protection from a woman whose financial circumstances guarantee she’ll be ignored by the system — that is, until chilly Marie calls Child Welfare.

Callie is emotionally but not financially equipped to care for her children; Marie is the opposite. But as we slowly learn, Marie herself was abused as a child. So who’s the bad guy?

Well, there really isn’t a bad guy, George Saunders tells us again and again. For most people, life is just rotten, and so is the system. The fat kids get mocked, the Callies lose their children, and the Al Roostens fade into oblivion. War criminals go free, cancer patients succumb, and defenseless puppies are abandoned in cornfields.

The best we can strive for is to do good whenever given the chance, though our tools be “few.”

David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and runs WriteByNight writers’ service in Austin.

books@dallasnews.com

Tenth of December

George Saunders

(Random House, $26)

Plan your life

George Saunders will speak at 7 p.m. April 19 at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of Arts & Letters Live. Free, but reserve tickets at www.tickets.dallasmuseumofart.org or 214-922-1818.

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